Hanging In There...

I'm still here, kicking a little less, fighting some stupidity...  I guess.

Back in 2008, I was hospitalized for over a week.  I had a significant amount of pain in my leg, went to see the doctor, and got an antibiotic shot.  And i was told to come back if my foot got "redder".  Two days later I was told to go to the ER.  They ran me through a bunch of tests, and a surgeon opened up my left shin and dug out a lot of infected tissue.  

I guess I was lucky to keep the leg, the next 90 days were about as difficult as they've been lately.  i learned a great deal about managing my diabetes.  And I learned a little more about the world.  Which was, aside from my wife and kids, not too many people gave a great deal of crap about me.  Sure, I have friends, but when it comes to help solving problems, many of them land on me.

Back in 2008, I came home with a stack of prescriptions.  A couple were for test strips, lancets, and a blood meter.  I would poke the end of my finger, wait for blood to come out, and get it onto one of the test strips, which had been loaded in the meter.  My goal was to keep the number that appeared on the meter below 120.  Some days it was, more often it was somewhere between 120 and 150.  Sometimes it would be up in the 300s.  Then I'd take my short-acting insulin pen (another prescription), screw a needle tip onto it, and inject myself.  I would take that blood sugar number, subtract 120, then divide that total by 5, and then inject that many units.  

What I found out two weeks ago is that those needle tips - the same needle tips I've been using since 2008 - have been discontinued.  So what?  Well, here come the fun parts.

I am an adult.  As an adult diagnosed with diabetes, the ultimate irony is I absolutely hate needles.  I'm not a huge fan of pain, either, but needles, no thank you.  I have never been good with getting shots, telling the nurses "please don't tell me I'm going to feel a little 'stick' because I will flinch away."  I still do.  I did terrible with testing my blood sugars over the years, primarily because I was losing the feeling in about three of my finger tips from repeatedly poking them for blood.  A couple of years ago, my doctor sent me home with another prescription for something called a "CGM" - Continuous Glucose Monitor.  It was a little tag thing that attached to my arm with adhesive, and stuck there for two weeks.  It would monitor my blood sugars, and I upgraded to a CGM reader, another meter that recorded that the moment I scanned it, and a trend-line showing what my blood sugars had been up - or down - to over the past up to 8 hours.  

To change those numbers, I had to inject that insulin.  And every injection had been through a Novofine Autocover 30 Gauge needle tips.  Every single injection since 2008.  

Unfortunately, they were discontinued by Novo Nordisk in May of 2024.  Why didn't I find out?  Well, I got several refills without problems over the last year - until about a month ago.  I was down to my last box and a half, so I figured it was time.  I ordered a refill from the pharmacy, and then it took quite a while before they told me they were backordered.  So two weeks ago I called the number on the box of needles, and the woman I spoke with - Preston - gave me the bad news.  So since then I've been looking for alternatives. 

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